Google's
Android handsets have been growing in popularity in Indonesia, just like in other countries where they can get a smartphone with relatively lower price compared to the
iPhone. And to make things interesting, last year Eric Schmidt
announced Android Gingerbread's support for NFC (
Near Field Communication) and of course payment is most likely to be the main usage.
In Indonesia, e-payment has been always an issue with almost no e-payment solution working properly. The reason? The users simply have no interest of using e-payment solution and quite happy with manual bank transfer which might be caused by the lack of service that's easy enough for common user to use, e-payment requires to much hassle compared to e-banking or m-banking.
But of course, this can be easily disrupted.
Looking the
increasing trend of Android phones in Indonesia, it seems that Android is going to be the leading platform in 3-4 years, maybe less. And combining with the fact that Android has been pushing its NFC support, it's a big possibility that Android NFC will gain popularity among Indonesians as an e-payment solution. The trend of growing Android phones in Indonesia, the increasing behavior of buying stuff online and the insanely huge penetration for smartphones in Indonesia seems like a perfect fit.
For the last few years credit card penetration in Indonesia is still very low, which is the reason on why credit card-based payment platform is not popular in Indonesia. But with the
increasing economic strength and consumer buying power, I think e-payment platform will also grow immensely in the next few years regardless the low number of credit cards in-use. Debit card may still be dominant, but mobile e-payment solution is almost inevitable.
Android growing, smartphones dominating, mobile internet increasing, combined with surging buying power, Android's NFC Payment solution could gain significant popularity in Indonesia. For all I know, Indonesia could be the next big market for internet and mobile services. Or maybe I'm just biased ;-)
